Road to highway bill: Bipartisanship

Bipartisanship was the grease in the last transportation bill’s gears, and it’ll most likely have to be again if lawmakers want to get the next one over the finish line. And the race has already begun.

Earlier this year, both parties came together and enacted a two-year, $109 billion transportation bill — ugly though it was — in what eventually was a bipartisan show of force. And though it was signed into law amid sighs of relief, most viewed the end result as barely good enough, an effort tied together with string and baling wire.

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“Let’s remember that nobody was happy at the end result,” said one highway lobbyist. “Tell me a stakeholder out there that identified pension stabilization as their way to pay for the next transportation bill.”

In any case, as the gears begin to turn on the next session, a postmortem on the last transportation bill may serve as an object lesson for those who have to do it all over again over the next two years.

Lawmakers managed to put a bandage over flagging revenues into the Highway Trust Fund by scraping together a handful of mostly unrelated revenue offsets that won grudging approval. But once the bill expires, the same problems will be back, and likely worse.

Virtually everyone agrees what’s needed as lawmakers draft another bill against an October 2014 deadline is another bipartisan effort. But with the country’s finances still as touchy a subject as ever, the road to bipartisanship may first have to be paved with a deal on financing.

The upshot: The Senate worked on and passed a pared-down bill that had significant bipartisan support from start to finish. The House, in contrast, swung for the fences with a longer, more ambitious bill — but it was also fatally flawed, loaded with poison pills that enraged Democrats and even some Republicans couldn’t support.

Those included an attempt to oust transit funding from its beachhead in the Highway Trust Fund, opening more offshore areas to oil and gas drilling and language related to approving the Keystone XL pipeline, among others.